MONTREAL —« The followup album to Adam Cohen’s well-received 2011 disc Like a Man was sequenced, mastered and ready to go — or so the singer-songwriter had thought.

Then he decided to scrap it.

“When you’ve got a record company and release dates and publicists on standby and musicians on hold, it’s a catastrophe,” Cohen, 41, said during a recent interview at the Mile End home of his father, the poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen. “It’s the opposite of capitalizing on momentum. So it was devastating. And embarrassing.”

Performance anxiety has always been present when he records, Cohen said. But what he experienced this time, in a Los Angeles studio, seemed different. His growing number of fans had made an unexpected success of Like a Man, which was certified gold in Canada, with just under 50,000 in sales. For the first time in his career, he said, there were expectations surrounding the new album.

“I had announced from the rooftops to anyone who would listen that I’d found my voice on Like a Man. And the record I’d made in L.A. bore no traces of that,” he said. “What I heard — outside of accomplished musicians, great takes and a beautiful, formal studio — was the anxiety in my voice. I heard the sound of eagerness and trying to please, like a guy with too much gel in his hair or a woman with too much makeup.”

Going against the advice of some to just put the album out, Cohen shut the door on the project. “(I had) a deep, deep-seated need to prove that the last record wasn’t just some fluke, that I had indeed locked my wagon to rails,” he said.

It was while touring to promote Like a Man that Cohen and his band came up with a formula to translate that album’s “devilishly intimate and quiet” songs into something more dynamically suited for live presentation, he said. The alchemy, as he put it, that came out of that tour was applied to the songs on the followup disc he finally is releasing: We Go Home, out on Tuesday. And the payoff is a forceful, highly melodic and moving piece of work that is easily his strongest album yet.

The recording of the album was split between the homes where the singer-songwriter grew up, in Montreal and on the Greek island of Hydra. “Let’s face it: Montreal has some of the worst weather of any city on the whole planet. Hydra is the opposite,” he said. “Here, I was in thermal socks and a bathrobe. Over there, I was barefoot in my bathing suit. But the ethos of the homes are very, very similar, and the comfort that both brought to the project were very nourishing and very similar.”

As he did on his previous release, Cohen uses words that are more direct and plain-spoken than the lyrics one commonly associates with his father. It’s the songwriter’s perpetual dilemma: to be poetic or blunt. Cohen even addresses the problem on the new album’s stunning opener, Song of Me and You.

“If you chart the architectural changes in my father’s writing, from his earlier work to his later work, he’s gotten increasingly simple and direct. You find that with most writers. Henry Miller was a great example of that: he got more and more terse. That’s generally the direction that people’s writing takes,” he said. “Imagine the tyranny that it was for me to be tempted to embellish my writing and try to evoke my father’s writing — his early work — and how incapable I, or almost anybody else, would have been to do so. So I had to arduously develop a way of editing myself and finding poetry while being direct. That was, and remains, my challenge.”

Oddly, while Cohen sounds even more assured of his own artistic identity on We Go Home than he did on the previous album, the presence of his father is everywhere. There are allusions to Cohen Sr.’s songs. There’s a reference, in Fall Apart, to the Montreal home, a place Cohen said is “dense with memories of finding my old man sitting exactly where I am now, with his nylon-string guitar in his hands.” (Fall Apart, with its apparent ruminations on death, is so personal that Cohen politely declined to discuss the song at all, saying he had hesitations about including it on the album.)

And most significantly, there’s a photo, on the CD’s back cover, of 5-year-old Adam, armed with a paintbrush, using his father’s face as a canvas. (“He’s always been a willing participant to the folly and whims of people in his midst,” Cohen said.)

The cover shot is of Cohen’s 7-year-old son, Cassius. The juxtaposition of the two pictures illustrates what Cohen calls the central theme of the record: the unbroken family chain. “You gotta carry your father’s name / And hope your children do the same,” he sings in So Much to Learn, while Put Your Bags Down casts him as both the receiver and dispenser of paternal wisdom. “I’m alternating, in almost every song, between being the father and the son,” he said.

Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas — his first studio album in almost eight years — was released shortly after Like a Man. This year, in an unexpected coincidence, the elder Cohen will release Popular Problems only a week after We Go Home comes out.

“I don’t think it’s a plot to eclipse me,” Adam Cohen said, chuckling. “But I will say this: If there is someone by whom I am going to be eclipsed, there’s no person I’d rather give way to than the old man.”

The singer’s increasing popularity was illustrated last October by a concert at the Maison symphonique, with Cohen sharing the bill with chanteuse Coeur de pirate, both working with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. The classically trained orchestra musicians, it seems, were initially skeptical.

“The marriage between the formality in the highly unionized methodology of an orchestra versus the high casualness of folk-rock was clumsy,” Cohen said. During rehearsals, he said, he asked the orchestra whether he could add an extra measure before his vocal came in.

“The first violinist slammed down her bow on the stand and said, ‘This is the height of unprofessionalism!’ And I said, ‘Pardon me, I know you are used to playing the work of composers who are dead, but I’m alive. And I think it’s not asking too much of a privilege to suggest that, in my composition, I add a bar where I want to add a bar.’ This was an alien notion to them,” he said.

In the end, Cohen got his extra measure — “and a standing ovation which, I think, assuaged any grievances they were harbouring at the end,” he said.

With a Canadian tour around the corner, Cohen said he is — as suggested in Put Your Bags Down — following his heart. “But my heart still manages to be the abyss of reason on more occasions than I’d like to admit,” he said.

We Go Home is released on Tuesday, Sept. 16. Adam Cohen performs Thursday, Sept. 18 at 6 p.m. at the Church of St. John the Evangelist, 137 President Kennedy Ave., as part of POP Montreal. The concert is sold out. Cohen also performs Nov. 21 at Théâtre Maisonneuve of Place des Arts. Tickets cost $32.50 to $55 and go on sale Friday, Sept. 19 at noon; call 514-842-2112 or visit pda.qc.ca.

Just received the new Adam Cohen CD and listening for the first time. It is very good - similar to his last album. Despite the numerous comparisons with Leonard, it is his own sound and on the whole not the same Leonard's - although there is one track which could have been written by Leonard. Looking forward to seeing him in Cork next month.